Mullen’s first film role was in Irish director Mary McGuckian’s Man on the Train (2011), with Donald Sutherland in the lead - “still he says acting is outside his zone of comfort, but he is courageous, becomes safer and safer and is perfect in the part,” Poppe explained.

Inspired by Poppe’s own experiences as a war photographer in the 1980s, A Thousand Times Good Night (aka Grenade) is the story of a photographer, Rebekka, who is torn between the job she feels as a vocation and the family she loves so much.

Binoche and Coster-Waldau play the photographer and her husband, Mullen Jr and Kennedy their best friends, in the drama, which will mainly shoot in Dublin and Morocco, Kenya and Afghanistan, for Norwegian producer Finn Gjerdrum’s Paradox.

Scripted by Poppe with Norwegian writer Harald Rosenløw Eeg, the $7 million (NOK 40 million) project is packaged in collaboration with Ireland’s Newgrange Pictures and Zentropa International Sweden. Norway’s Euforia Film will release domestically in the autumn 2013.

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